(Austin. Source: Paul Miller)
My very first report for Forrester, last summer, explored the ways in which the open source OpenStack cloud project has grown up. Once a science project for those interested in exploring the technologies or celebrating open source, OpenStack now runs key enterprise workloads for the likes of AT&T, BMW, Best Buy, and Volkswagen. They are choosing OpenStack because it gets the job done, not because they have some affinity for it, its community, its components, or its philosophy.

Last week, OpenStack returned to the scene of the very first community Summit - Austin - for an event that drew over 7,500 attendees from around the world.

There was little to wow, there was little that was truly new, there was little that deserved a headline. But there was a lot that demonstrated the steady, difficult, important slog to improve, to harden, to simplify. OpenStack continues to grow up.